What Works and What Doesn’t in Partner Programs

Research from IDC suggests some classic program benefits don’t have the same bite anymore. Plus: Former ConnectWise CEO Jason Magee’s new gig and two new sources of sales and marketing help for MSPs.

It’s far from news for regular Channelholic readers that partners are doing more business with fewer vendors these days. We’ve been writing about the issue for nearly a year now.

The latest evidence comes from IDC in its recently published North America Partner Landscape Study for 2024, in which half of survey participants report having fewer than five active vendor relationships. That’s a finding consistent with a longer-term downward trend, according to Steve White, the analyst’s program vice president for channels and alliances.

“It’s competitive out there, it really is,” he says.

Especially if you’re not a partner program heavyweight. Some 76% of the partners IDC polled, for example, have an active relationship with Microsoft, 49% are active with AWS, 43% with Cisco, 36% with Google, etc. So if you’re not an industry goliath, you’re contending with thousands of other vendors for the maybe two or three partnership slots not taken up by the likes of Microsoft.

White (pictured) has thoughts on winning that contest. Interestingly, they focus as much on what channel chiefs shouldn’t do as on what they should.

1. Don’t lead with lead gen. Vendors like to boast about all the sales prospects they send their partners.

“They have these machines where they’re creating ‘leads,’” White says. “I’m deliberately air quoting ‘leads’ because they ain’t always great leads.” Most are barely warm let alone hot, in fact, and partners that don’t waste time acting on them anyway get penalized for being unresponsive.

More importantly, in the age of social and digital marketing, partners don’t really value leads anymore. According to IDC’s new data, 58% of them call in-house marketing an important source of leads. Just 17% say the same of vendors.

2. Don’t push your portal. Every vendor has one, and if it serves up nothing but one-size-fits-all resources, it’s probably not generating much enthusiasm. IT providers eager to stand out from the crowd don’t want the same marketing materials everyone else is getting.

“They want to be differentiated,” White observes. Vendors that figure out how to personalize their portals (like Ingram Micro’s Xvantage platform) and content will have a distinct advantage.

3. Don’t segment by partner type. “Most of the vendors have built their programs around a sell and a service and a build motion,” White notes. Catering to those models separately made sense back when most partners fit into just one. These days, though, partners fit into an average of 3.8 models each, according to IDC, ranging from VAR to MSP to software developer to cloud solution provider.

“There’s no such thing as partner types anymore,” White notes. Unified requirement and benefit schemes that reflect as much are easier for partners to navigate, and therefore more appealing as well.

4. Don’t talk products. Because the people your partners are selling to don’t care about them much anymore. “Very few customers now buy singular products,” White says. “They want to buy outcomes.”

Which is what partners strive to sell them as a result. Fully 79% of those surveyed by IDC, in fact, included IT consulting among the services they provide, versus 77% for helpdesk support, 68% for cloud management, and 66% for security.

“They’re all trying to be a solution provider or a something provider,” White says of partners. “They’re bringing these little Lego kits together.” Pre-assembling those kits is a smart way to drive partner loyalty, he continues, pointing to AI as a market especially ripe for a few kits.

“There’s lot of noise going on, and you’ve got to help them see some paths through it,” White counsels, by giving them something specific and actionable to sell. Few vendors are doing so at present, he adds, but partners will reward whoever fills that gap first.

“It’s a massive opportunity,” White says.

Jason Magee’s new gig

Say this at least for Jason Magee. He’s not afraid to fill big shoes.

The last time he did so was 2019, when he replaced ConnectWise founder and managed services icon Arnie Bellini as CEO. Now he’s done it again by replacing founder and cyber industry hotshot Eyal Gruner as CEO of security vendor Cynet.

“This may be my niche,” says Magee (pictured) wryly.

The last time Channelholic readers heard from Magee was three months ago, as he was wrapping up a five-year stint atop ConnectWise in which he grew revenue over 300% and increased profitability by 500%. During a brief chat, I noted, Magee hinted that he pretty much knew what he would be doing next, and I figured we’d all find out about it this spring or summer.

Turns out we only had to wait until February, and the reason Magee didn’t share more about his plans in November was that the only decision he’d made as of then was to be CEO somewhere again instead of serving on boards or at a private equity fund. The open question was where.

“I had several really exciting opportunities,” Magee says. “This one I just kept coming back to.”

The reasons why relate closely to insights Magee first gleaned at ConnectWise about where the action in IT is and will likely remain for a while, starting with something his former MSP partners value a lot right now.

“I’m passionate about platforms,” Magee says, adding that the same is true of security and hyperautomation. “As I continued to dig in with Cynet, it turned out they have all three.”

Like Guardz and Judy Security, among others, Cynet makes an automated, integrated, end-to-end (except for backup) suite of security solutions for SMBs. Businesses large and small need platforms like that, according to Magee, to avoid the protection and productivity weakening impact of “tool sprawl.”

“People get fatigued by it,” he says.

As at ConnectWise, Magee is inheriting a company in pretty solid shape at present. Cynet doubled net new ARR last year and was alone among 17 vendors tested to score 100% on both prevention and detection visibility in the 2024 MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation. Its customer base is mostly overseas though, and its channel leans heavily toward VARs. Magee plans to increase the company’s footprint in North America and among MSPs, and to leverage relationships formed at ConnectWise to add ecosystem partners.

“There’s opportunity to work with other technology vendors out there,” he says.

Could those future technology partners end up including managed services vendors? There’s an argument to be made that security platforms like Cynet’s are better than point solutions but inferior to platforms that combine security with management tools, BDR, and everything else an IT provider needs. Kaseya certainly believes as much, and ConnectWise differs only in having a prominent place in its platform for third-party software in addition to its own.

So does the former CEO of ConnectWise and current CEO of Cynet prefer ConnectWise-style platforms or security-specific ones like Cynet’s? The other thing true of Magee, in addition to his having no fear of replacing highly regarded founders, is that he’s way too smart to take the bait on a question like that.

“I think there’s benefits of both,” he says.

Two new sources of sales and marketing help for MSPs

Just because channel partners generate most of their own leads these days, according to IDC’s data, doesn’t mean they’re any good at it.

Or that they have much time for it. Nancy Henriquez (pictured), a former MSP with deep experience in sales and marketing, is working to fill both gaps through a new venture named Sibyl Consulting. Aimed at younger, smaller MSPs with maybe a handful of techs, the service takes care of lead gen for them.

“They aren’t really looking to have someone on staff to handle that,” she observes.

Sibyl also designs and optimizes sales processes, trains clients to execute them, and assists with related operational tasks.

“We’ll basically make sure that an onboarding process is not only in place but also that it aligns with the promise that they’re making with their sales and marketing efforts,” Henriquez says.

Pricing begins at $500 a month for the outsourced marketing piece of the service.

Sales and marketing figure prominently in the newest offering from Gradient MSP as well. Called MSP Studio, it’s a resource hub for managed service providers stocked with ready-made marketing toolkits.

“We’ve got 12 full turnkey campaigns, about one month each, so call it a full year’s worth of marketing, all professionally designed,” says Colin Knox, Gradient’s CEO and co-founder.

The site also offers two to three minute “microlearning” content. “We’ve pulled together a list of industry experts and thought leaders across a variety of topics, like sales and marketing, operations and scaling, and forming cybersecurity programs,” Knox says. New content about M&A, service delivery, and additional subjects will be added regularly, he notes, and a series of educational webinars launches next week.

“We continue to bring more and more experts into the fold,” Knox says.

Included as well is an expanded and redesigned version of the pricing benchmark tool we first told you about last August. “We had hundreds and hundreds of MSPs that came through and benchmarked themselves,” Knox says. “We wanted to be able to deliver that same data and insight in an easier to digest manner.”

Like the pricing tool, MSP Studio is entirely free to use whether you’re a Gradient client or not.

“It’s all wide open,” Knox says. Costs for the portal are being covered by a collection of vendors that includes Augmentt, Barracuda, Huntress, Keeper Security, and Sherweb.

MSP Studio debuted two weeks after another addition to Gradient’s portfolio, a managed edition of its flagship billing reconciliation system.

“MSPs were coming in ultimately looking for a solution where they didn’t have to do any reconciliation at all,” Knox says. Gradient’s managed reconciliation service lets them hand that chore off to a dedicated team of billing specialists, shielding themselves in the process from errors that can destroy client relationships.

“There’s few areas where you can make a single mistake and lose all trust from your customer,” Knox says. “It’s just not worth that risk, especially when there’s alternatives and easy ways to offload that from your team.”

By the way…

Knox is one of many CEOs who’ve appeared on the podcast I co-host, which will feature interviews with CEOs from N-able, Sophos, and Syncro just in the next few weeks. Check it out here.

Also worth noting

• Top Down Ventures, the “VC unicorn” we told you about recently, has put $3.2 million of seed funding into ThreatMate, a startup maker of attack surface management software for MSPs.

• ThreatMate credits ConnectWise’s PitchIT program, which we’ve also told you about before, for helping it into the MSP market. Applications for this year’s PitchIT contest are open now through April 30th.

• Well, that didn’t take long. New Relic has added an observability service for DeepSeek.

• Speaking of AI, Zoho and ManageEngine have begun previewing task-specific AI agents for their combined roster of over 100 products.

• TeamViewer’s remote support solution now integrates with Google Meet.

• The 2025 update to Dell’s partner program features sales incentives and competencies for AI networking, AI PCs, and more.

• SentinelOne’s Singularity Endpoint solution now integrates with CyberArk’s Endpoint Privilege Manager.

• Sectigo has introduced a “cryptographic sandbox” for people striving to adopt NIST’s post-quantum encryption standards. More on this topic coming soon in a future post.

• Speaking of post-quantum security, the latest edition of Check Point’s Infinity Platform includes quantum policy assessment and auditing tools.

• Speaking of Check Point, its Harmony Email & Collaboration and Harmony SASE solutions are now available in the Sherweb marketplace.

• Peter Gyenes, formerly of Sophos and Pegasystems among others, is now chairman of Syncro.

• Justin Catlett is the new president at Reinvent Telecom.

• Jon Kelly is the new CRO at Mako Networks.

• GoTo’s LogMeIn Resolve platform has new MDM and RMM features. It’s also now available in the Pax8 marketplace.

• Further proof we’re in the age of managed everything. Impartner, which makes partner relationship management software, also now offers partner management as a service.